PETpla.net Insider 01+02 / 2010

BOTTLING / FILLING 23 PET planet insider Vol. 11 No. 01+02/10 www.petpla.net are also running three shifts, another blower from another part of the busi- ness supplies the extra bottles. Mr Bedi is particularly proud of the water treatment plant, installed three years ago. “This enabled us to reduce the water usage in production from 30 litres per case down to 11.8l per case”. He is generally very environ- mentally aware and conscious of the need to save energy. “For our preform production we have to generate our own electricity, which costs twice as much as electricity supplied by the government, but it is only at the begin- ning of next year, after 5 years, that we will be able to link up to the main supply. In future we will also have to significantly reduce our consump- tion of oil, which includes using less oil-based PET and focussing more on glass”, he says. We asked whether PLA would be an alternative. “In India we have over 15% of the world popu- lation, living on 2.14% of the earth’s surface. We need our productive land to provide food and not to produce packaging”. He made it quite clear. In the air-conditioned PET hall there are three 225 ton Husky HyPETs. Six different mould tools, each with 48 cavities, are enough to cover the whole of the beverage range. In total 1 million preforms per day can be supplied. Of these there are about 450,000 x 22g, 350,000 x 25.5g and 250,000 x 52g. There are a total of 50 employees in the preform plant working on a 3-shift basis. 1322 x 22g preforms are packed in small handy cartons and then stacked onto pallets. A forklift takes the cartons to the truck where, as is normal in India, they are loaded by hand. The truck leaves the plant and goes directly to the filling plant. For customers in That is the motto of the Jaipuria Group, who, as a PepsiCo licensee, supplies around 40% of the Indian market with soft drinks from the American group. Jaipuria is broken down into various divisions depending on the job which they do. Preform production operates under the name of Pearl Drinks, and the filling lines under the Pearl Bottling name. C. K. Jaipuria oversees the whole operation. Visit to the plant in Jammu, India Delhi the preforms are delivered within 24 hours, but for those in the south the truck-drivers plan for a 3-week journey. A positive aspect to the use of the car- tons is that the preforms coming off the conveyor do not fall very far into the small cartons, and so any damage is largely avoided. Because in the off-peak season the preform factory supplies Jaipuria’s own plants in the south of India it runs right through the year at a very high level of capacity utilisation. Each line has its own material feed system - two delivered by Plastic systems and one by Piovan. When- ever Mr. Bedi talks about his views of PET and PLA, he comments on the material feed equipment. “I prefer the Plastic systems equipment,” he says, “but as a company Piovan is in front”. Mr Bedi also pays special atten- tion to the cooling systems, as the temperature reaches as high as 44°C. But alongside monitoring the technical aspects of the plant he has one more highly responsible task: I was allowed to plant a tree in his company garden and he has promised to care for it and look after it for me. Alexander Büchler As well as producing preforms the plant at Jammu fills the whole of the Jai Beverages and Jai Juices range of drinks: CSDs in glass and PET, water in PET and juices in hot-fill glass. There is also a Tetra pak line for 0.2l packs of juice. In total the whole plant runs at over 1,000 fills per minute. The plant is managed by the ever-anxious Mr. Bedi. It was he who created a flourishing beverage plant 10 years ago on an industrial site that had been empty for 5 years. “When we started this was all an overgrown wilderness”, he said talking about how the plant began. PET bottle blowing is done on various linear MAG and Sidel machines and filling is done using mechanical fillers. To ensure that the production facilities are as flexible as possible the blowers are not directly linked to the filling machines. This means that the blowers can run three shifts, delivering the bottles into silos. In the high season, when the fillers Mr Uday Bhan, centre, C.E.O. of the PET preform division of Pearl Drinks, and Deputy General Manager Vijay Walia (left), have established PDL Preforms as a new brand within the company. F.l.t.r.:Alexander Büchler; SK Gupta, AGM Pearl Drinks, Jammu; Tejbir Singh Bedi, Vice President Jai Beverages, Jammu, and Vijay Walia at their visit of the preform production site.